Verse 1
I’m gonna live for the sake of my unfinished business
For the ambitions yet to furnish me with a worthy Christmas
For all those I’d never have the chance to make dependent on me
I will live, I will live, I will live, I will live
If I can process, accept and get the best of the fact that
I will know death before I’ll come to really, truly know life
I cried all night til I felt natural; weeping for me and my disease
While the doctors talk, by the looks of it
This pestilence will follow me right up life’s track
Which no snow fall’s insurance can cover or give bivouac
The truth is that I didn’t deserve it and deserve it all back
But the truth is not necessarily a fact
As breath catches, trapped by the enemy within I’m made
A beast of will; whatever breath I take is breath I take
Taunt my brother best with my winnowed chest, death
For you know whose will is stronger
Chorus
Death’s got owt to claim from me, ma
There’s nothing but breath to take away
The lack of hope that’s in your brow
Alone’s enough to cut me to the bone
Hey mama, hey mama
Is my name on the list?
Go and see, go and see, go and see
And if my luck has expired
Let it be
Verse 2
She asks “How is he?”
“Alive, though less than living,” dad sighs
Never even heard him sigh, all through his
Life; a life worth singing, worth filming, but not surviving
To first make myself heave in sympathy
I’d pictured brother there on the gurney
Console myself those last words were his
Last words, and that I should have heard ‘em, but
Aye, it’s uncle laid there, ailing, first love of parents both
I felt I could only relate by interpolating
What’s dogged him from birth threatens to get him good
Though I suspect to get him good would be beyond even death
Between the waste-hastening patients whom he disdained
I heard uncle mumble something bout ambition
And his thousandth Christmas, and I wondered at him
You don’t have to do this alone
Or do you?
Even his was a loss whose prospect I deplored;
This affection, against principled and logical convictions
Penetrates gore and sinew, could school
The blood better to seep, and then at last, all
Else cut through, reaches to the bone
Pop stayed alone behind, slumped chillingly enough
To turn tears to snow on a cheek’s bluff
As this one part of the body suffers
So did we, all its other parts, suffer with it
Bridge
Feeling fine, feeling fine
Feeling like Jerzy Kukucka
Up there on his Polish line
Feeling fine, I’m feeling fine
Feeling like I could traverse the Diamir
Face drunk on half a case of wine
Verse 3
In depriving me, humiliating me so
Surely grief will turn me into
A nation of lunatics
Indeed I prepared myself for its circus
Full fare with the insane, and its stay;
And yet the once mocking faces of the animals
Turned in time to a mirror for my grief
They packed up and left my grounds
And the sad circus song which birded about
My plundered ribcage in their wake
Was the precursor to nothing; and what nothing!
Brother
That you were not going
That you were not going where
You are going
The price I would pay:
I would happily see you
Walk down the street
As someone to whom I could never speak
Whom I would never meet
If that would give you back
Your access to all the days you are owed
I would give it up, I would give it up:
The best thing that has ever occurred to me
If it could only be for its own sake
And that’s what I’ll do
Remember you as looking at you
From afar, being made to change in state
With a curiosity I’ve got no nerve to slake
And in time, in my mind
I will have lost enough in guilt
Thespian power and breast-filling anger
To go up and meet you again
Coda
“Feeling fine, feeling fine
Feeling like Jerzy Kukucka up
There on his Polish line”
